mardi 30 décembre 2014

strict formatting in US dissertations


Recently, I got a mildly panicked email from a friend/collaborator who was preparing the final manuscript of his thesis. He had just noticed that page numbers were a fraction of an inch closer to the page edge than the regulations of his university specify, and he was concerned that the lady in charge of filing dissertations would notice and reject the manuscript. This concern wasn't unjustified: I personally know a couple of people who had to reprint their dissertations at the last minute because they had the type of formatting errors that you need a ruler to notice.


In the end, I was able to tell my friend how to modify his TeX markup to avoid disaster, but I was left wondering: why are (some) US universities so obsessed about aspects of a dissertation that nobody will ever care about, or even notice? I did my PhD in Europe (Netherlands), and nobody there cares much about the formatting of your dissertation, so long as it doesn't look silly.





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